William F Hildenbrand with Caleb Boggs

William F. Hildenbrand Secretary of the Senate, 1981-1985 Secretary to the Minority, 1974-1981 Administrative Assistant to Senator Hugh Scott, 1969-1974 Assistant to Senator J. Caleb Boggs, 1961-1969 Interview #2: With Caleb Boggs (Thursday, March 28, 1985) Interviewed by Donald A. Ritchie Ritchie: I wanted to go back and talk about the Clean Air Act, which you mentioned before. That was the first big piece of legislation that you worked on, or at least Boggs was associated with it. I wondered if you could tell me about the type of work you did on that legislation, how you got started in the whole process. Hildenbrand: Well, since he was ranking on the committee, and in those days, in the early '60s -- what was it? '63 maybe? I guess it was -- we did not have the legislative assistant support that members have now, where they have a legislative assistant separate for each committee on which they serve, plus a legislative shop that does all their other legislation. In those days, in small states like Delaware, we had a legislative assistant period. We were on three committees: Agriculture, Environment and Public Works, and Post Office and Civil Service. I did all three of those committees. Agriculture I didn't know anything about at all, and the other two I learned. When he became ranking on that subcommittee, I took on the full responsibility of doing whatever had to be done in terms of the legislation. page 54 I did all of the Clean Air Act legislation along with the Democrats, in formulating it, in getting his positions, whatever they were, pretty well known within the committee. He and Muskie had been former governors at the same time, came from primarily the same size states, small states. While the air in Maine might have been a little better than it was in Delaware, we had portions of Delaware which also had pretty good air. So they thought pretty much alike in terms of what it was they wanted to do in terms of Clean Air legislation. Ritchie: That was a pretty uncharted course. There really wasn't very much in the way of legislation before that. What did you do? Hildenbrand: They had a lot of hearings, and brought in all of the groups that wanted to testify, and brought in all of the industries that would be affected, and tried to get some sort of a determination as to what impact it would have, and how would it affect them. How do we proceed? What do we cover? Do we do it at the smokestack? We talked about ambient air quality standards and air quality standards. Because we were not sophisticated at that time and because it was a United States Senate Historical Office -- Oral History Project www.senate.gov new field, we went to sort of single air quality standards that were easily definable. We did not worry too much about the so-called ambient air, as to what total affect it would have in the atmosphere, because we really didn't know. We knew that page 55 certain pollutants in parts per million would be dangerous either to somebody's health, or would soil clothes and do stuff like that. We looked at it more in the situation of doing air quality standards rather than trying to do ambient air quality standards, because the air throughout the United States was different. What you might need as a standard in Marcus Hook, Pennsylvania, for example, which is heavy with oil refineries, in order to clean that up, you would need a totally different standard than you'd need in Vail, Colorado, for example, or even Denver. So to affix a national standard would have been totally unfair to the people in Maine, and Minnesota, and places like that that do not have the concentration of industry that a Marcus Hook had. We had to look at it in terms of devising standards that could be applied all over the country without causing problems. So we stayed away pretty much from a national standard for pollutants, because it just didn't make any sense. Then, in addition to that, we began to fool around in the automobile exhaust areas, with carbon monoxide and those hydrocarbons, and here again we ran into the same kind of a situation, because in Los Angeles, because it's inverted, because it sits in a valley heavy with automobile pollution, whereas some other places that had good circulation of air would not be faced with the same kind of problems, or did not have the amount of traffic. That was another problem that we had to look at in terms of establishing standards that would not page 56 again be unrealistic in some areas, and would cost an awful lot of money to solve a problem that wasn't a problem. We made trips into Detroit and went through the plants to see the kind of things that they were working on to hold down pollution from their exhausts, and things like that. Ritchie: Did you find it an educational experience? Hildenbrand: In terms of environment I learned an awful lot about air and water pollution that I certainly didn't know before. I can't say that it stood me in good stead since that time, but it's a knowledge that I now have, even if I never use it. Ritchie: Well, did you find that your views changed as you studied the issue? United States Senate Historical Office -- Oral History Project www.senate.gov Hildenbrand: No, not really. Basically my views were conservative in terms of applying government controls. I guess my political philosophy was based on Eisenhower's idea that government should only do for people what they cannot do for themselves. That's the way we sort of looked at this pollution thing: that we ought to involve ourselves in it, but at the same time we should not just try to take it over. Because we also realized that we could conceivably shut down plants, which would have cost countless jobs in given territories. In those days, a device which was called an electrostatic precipitator, which you put on the top of a smokestack in order to page 57 control the pollutants coming out of a smokestack, cost a million dollars. They were made in Germany. So, if you sit there with a steel industry burning coke or soft coal, and you have eight or ten smokestacks, you've got ten million dollars invested which you can't get back. You're not going to make anything from it. We always tried to look and see whether there wasn't some way of taking the potash, or whatever it was that we were collecting in those electrostatic precipitators and reselling them into something else, but that was hard to do. Ritchie: There was a lot of industry opposition, and I wondered, with Delaware being a state identified with the chemical industry, if you or Senator Boggs felt pressure from that industry? Hildenbrand: Well, I think that they -- and maybe I'm treating them unfairly -- but I think that they believed that they could bring pressure to bear on Cale because the DuPont Company was a member of what was then called the Manufacturing Chemists Association. They sent to testify a DuPont employee, William Conners. He was the witness who came in on behalf of the chemical industry to testify. But he was a DuPont employee; he was a solid, rock-ribbed Republican; his wife was big in Republican state circles; he eventually became New Castle county executive. I never thought about it before, but in retrospect, looking back on it, maybe they thought that that was one way, if they brought in somebody from Delaware, to make the page 58 presentation. But it was a very bad presentation, and as I indicated in a book that the Library of Congress wrote on the Clean Air Act, it was a very bad presentation, and I told the chemical industry in no uncertain terms how bad I thought it was. But, maybe they did; I don't know. Ritchie: But Boggs wasn't the type of senator to bend to pressure? United States Senate Historical Office -- Oral History Project www.senate.gov Hildenbrand: No. Boggs had been under more pressure than they could conceivably think about bringing. The National Association for the Advancement of White People had its seeds in lower Delaware, and they fought him on the court order for desegregation of the school system. So he was used to pressures. And by that time he'd been governor for eight years and in the House for six. That's fourteen years. He knew all about pressure. It didn't bother him. Senator Caleb Boggs (R-DE) Senate Historical Office Ritchie: The interesting thing to me about the Clean Air Act was that in the House there was a lot of debate over it when it got to the floor, and a majority of Republicans in the House voted against it. In the Senate there was practically no debate. When it got to the floor they all stood up and said what a wonderful bill it was, and they adopted it by voice vote. Why was there such a difference? page 59 Hildenbrand: I think that's a basic difference between the House and the Senate anyway. With a small number of people you have a tendency to trust your committee system, and trust the people that are on the committee.

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